With “Poseidon” playing on movie screens across the US, audiences are again intrigued by cruise ship disasters. But the grandmother of them all remains the “H.M.S. Titanic,” which sunk after hitting an iceberg 453 miles southeast of Newfoundland on April 15, 1912.

If you want to see a piece of undersea history, visit “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition” which opens on June 10 in the Metreon Entertainment Center in San Francisco. It features hundreds of artifacts like jewely, silverware, a table leg and the engine’s themometer from the Debris Field, 12,500 feet below the icy Atlantic, and is also simultaneously on display in Miami and Long Beach.

But the one in SF has something quite unique: a 13-by-30 foot fragment of the steel hull, weighing 15 tons, with 3 of its 6 portholes still in place. I saw this exhibit with the hull in Seattle a few years ago and it was spectacularly chilling, fascinating and disturbingly real. It also featured a 9-by-16 iceberg made of refrigerated aluminum that you can touch.